"Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?"
I think this test is fascinating when applied to the Musk vs. Gates debate from yesterday.
How taboo is it to say forget charity? I know I feel uncomfortable with saying: 'forget the poor, we can fix them after we've figured out how to create a sustainable form of first world living' and yet that seems like a far more rational strategy to act upon.
I had this thought this morning, though of a slightly different tone.
The radio talking head mentioned that they were going to interview an anti-civilizationist, someone who apparently thinks that developed society is unsustainable and will be the end of us all. Apparently he advocates for a return to pre-civilization?
I immediately thought, "We need to be able to leap forward, not backward. If this involves some sacrifice of human lives, it will save trillions in the long run. Pre-civilizaiton is just waiting for the next asteroid to impact the planet."
I don't understand how someone could be against civilization.
2000 yeas ago, the Earth population was ~200 Millions. (This is only an estimation, so don't take the number too seriously.) And 2000 years ago, we had ~10,000 years of agriculture and ~5,000 years of diverse grades of civilization.
So, to go to a pre-civilization population level we need at least 6,900,000,000 volunteers.
They don't necessarily have to volunteer. There's always the option of a forced choice. More likely through disease and/or starvation in my book, though other forms of population reduction are possible.
The argument that present, let alone near-future projected populations are long-term sustainable doesn't merit much support in my book.
And, NB, your 200 million estimate's reasonably close -- Wikipedia gives estimates of 150 - 330 million worldwide as of 0 CE:
I've been pointing this out in various places on threads regarding energy conservation, AGW, and similar things for a while. Remarkably few people seem to have any awareness of the idea that we had better maintain the infrastructure that allows us to feed a population ~30x bigger than it was ~1k years ago, or things are going to get mighty ugly.
There's the soft vs. hard landing options, with some of the hard-landing alternatives being rather more problematic than others (say: runaway greenhouse warming to the point that all land fauna > 10kg in mass go extinct, as has been suggested by some).
The question to my mind is one of: what level of civilization is sustainable?
Is it a modern technological society, say, 1950 - present? At what level of population and resource consumption?
A scientific and semi-industrial society, equivalent to, say, 1800 - 1900 or so? That's got some merits, but it would be rather rougher than has been experienced in the West since the 1950s or so.
An agrarian preindustrial society? This might preserve elements of arts and culture, but in limited forms. Think Roman empire or equivalents elsewhere.
Because its a fact that we cannot, with current technology, support 7 billion people living a modern lifestyle. We simply can't produce enough energy in a clean enough fashion to attempt anything of the sort.
Because technology is a force multiplier and will pay larger dividends than charitable endeavors.
Because “On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” - Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
*Keep in mind I'm making this statement as if we're only able to pursue one course of action (charity or technology). In reality we should, and are, pursue both solutions at once.
I think this test is fascinating when applied to the Musk vs. Gates debate from yesterday.
How taboo is it to say forget charity? I know I feel uncomfortable with saying: 'forget the poor, we can fix them after we've figured out how to create a sustainable form of first world living' and yet that seems like a far more rational strategy to act upon.